Tag Archives: hate

I’m usually the first person to mount some sort of a defense on reddit’s behalf. When people mention the misogyny, the racism, the various strains on online hate and digital bullying, I’m quick to point out that the large majority of redditors are fairly decent people, that on a site with something like nine million daily users, it’s unfortunate that a vocal minority of losers are granted a megaphone with which it can spew a steady stream of garbage, tarnishing reddit’s reputation as a whole.

Yesterday the reddit admins made the long-overdue decision to ban several of its more toxic subreddits, most prominently, a group called /r/fatpeoplehate. As its title suggests, /r/fatpeoplehate served as nothing more than a petri dish of body-shaming and name-calling. And much like reddit’s infamous cardboard-boxed collection of various bodily fluids, /r/fatpeoplehate thrived in the darkness, amassing an army of followers who relished in the opportunity to share embarrassing photos and regurgitated hate-speech, all from the cowardly confines of their homes.

I spend a lot of time on reddit, but recent events have made it harder to say anything positive. If you were online yesterday, you know what I’m talking about. Instead of its usual stream of mildly interesting gifs and dank memes, reddit’s front page was filled with outrage, directed at the admins and especially at reddit CEO Ellen Pao. As we speak, some of the site’s most upvoted content is nothing more than insults to Pao, calling her a Nazi, the c-word, you name it.

What went down yesterday requires a little bit of backstory, which, even if you’re familiar with the front page of the Internet, it might not make too much sense. Like I said, I’m on reddit all the time, and I’m still trying to figure out where all of these lunatics came from.

I guess it’s important to state that the hate was always there. Maybe you won’t see its more overt face on mainstream web sites, but try typing even the most depraved fringe ideas into Google and you’re guaranteed to find a shadow Internet of likeminded bloggers and trolls. It’s there because it exists in the real world, it’s amplified by the anonymous nature of the Internet, and when you throw in a massive content aggregator like reddit, founded on the tenets of free speech, it’s natural that those venomous ideas will unfortunately find a place to multiply and be heard.

The hate exists on reddit. It’s not just /r/fatpeoplehate. There are the blatantly racist subreddits. There are dumb movements like The Red Pill or Men’s Rights which serve as a violent backlash against feminism. And then there are the more insidious hate groups, subs like /r/cringe or /r/punchablefaces, community boards that offer nothing more than a place to post a picture of a person thought to be ugly or different, all while the rest of the group spews out its vomit, unfortunately elevating its most upvoted content to reddit’s front page.

That’s how these groups get attention. Every once in a while the hate will whip itself into an especially frothy frenzy, and due to the nature of reddit’s system of upvoting and downvoting content, it’s possible for massively popular posts to break out of their respective subs and onto the front page.

/r/fatpeoplehate had been garnering more and more attention recently. The only reason that I became aware of its existence was because I’d increasingly see the wreckage of its diarrhea-like content spilling over into the more general, default subs. The mods of some of the larger defaults did a pretty good job of banning and deleting offensive users, but eventually the problem became so pronounced, the reddit admins took the unusual step of banning the entire sub.

The reaction was swift. Almost immediately after /r/fatpeoplehate was deleted, /r/fatpeoplehate2 sprung into existence, the same 150,000 users picking up exactly where they had left off. Only now they felt provoked, justified in their own nonsensical belief that they were the victims of censorship. “Free speech!” became the self-righteous rallying cry under which the scummiest of reddit’s slime lashed out against the admins, and against Ellen Pao in particular.

People might see the resulting hate and its prominence on reddit’s front page as proof that reddit was never anything better than a sugarcoated version of its bad reputation. And when you click onto the front page and see nothing but top post after top post celebrating the violent denigration of its woman CEO, it’s hard to make an argument otherwise.

I’m seeing arguments online like, “This is what you get when you poke the bear!” I guess the logic here is that it’s better to have the racism, misogyny, and hate all cordoned off in its own field. But all I can say is, I don’t think the hate on reddit is a bear as much as it is an infestation of cockroaches. Just like when you have a house overrun with insects, as soon as you try to confront the problem, as soon as you drop a bomb right in the heart of its nest, you’re going to see the bugs scatter everywhere. Sure, they’re going to crawl out of the woodwork and everything is going to look gross, and no, you’re not going to be able to kill every last bug. In fact, it’s only a matter of time before they crawl into some other dark hole and start the repopulation process once again. But just because the hate will always be here doesn’t mean that we have to stand idly by and honor its desire to exist. Reddit made exactly the right move in trying to clean up a long overgrown mess.

I hate breakfast. Everybody’s always like, “Better eat a good breakfast! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” Fuck breakfast. There’s no way it’s more important than lunch or dinner. Hell, even a decent midafternoon snack is of more consequence than breakfast. Even if you don’t have anything in the house, just an apple maybe, a glass of juice. I’ll take a half-eaten bag of pretzels over breakfast any day of the week. Because breakfast sucks.

OK, take a second, close your eyes, imagine all of your favorite foods. Yeah, that’s it, OK, you’ve got them all there, now throw them all away, because we don’t eat any of that stuff for breakfast. Sorry, it’s just eggs and toast, bowls of cereal and yogurt, maybe some pancakes or waffles if your lucky, but even that’s kind of a once-in-a-while treat.

It’s terrible, because I wake up every morning and I’m starving. All I want to do is sit down and eat a full meal. But we don’t do that here. No, you’ve got to eat breakfast, a sorry excuse for what should be one of the three most pleasurable and delightful experiences of every day.

Most people don’t even bother with breakfast, simply because it’s not worth all of the time and trouble for something that’s ultimately not worth it. Better to just slog through the first part of the day on coffee alone and hope that you’re not too famished and pissed off by the time lunch rolls around.

Isn’t it like engrained in our culture? It’s almost perversely celebrated. It’s that scene that you always see in commercials for those Toaster Strudels or Go-Gurts or Eggo Waffles, where a family is running around the house like a bunch of lunatics in the morning, struggling to be wherever it is they’re supposed to get to time. “Don’t forget your breakfast!” the mom calls out to the dad who ran out the door with his tie undone around his neck, the little kids with their backpacks unzipped, homework flying everywhere. And then they stop for all of three seconds to stuff some hyper-processed piece of frozen garbage in their face, “Gee, thanks mom, you’re the best! You and Pop-Tarts!”

What’s there to look forward to? Get up every day, much earlier than you’d ever wake up if you had any real say of how you’d like to live your life, you barely have time to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, let alone consider what you’ll ingest as a means of early morning sustenance, not that it matters, not like you have much of a choice.

Ninety percent of breakfast is just dessert dressed up like a full meal anyway, trying to weasel its way closer to the bottom of the food pyramid. And don’t get me wrong, I love dessert, I love Dunkin Donuts. But you give them to me for breakfast, the entire trajectory of my day is ruined. Now what am I supposed to eat for actual dessert? How am I going to be able to satisfy my ever intensifying sweet tooth when the stuff I’m being presented as a treat bears little difference to the four pieces of frosted cake I’ve just eaten this morning for breakfast?

No, I’m throwing in the towel on behalf of breakfast. Let’s just give it up, OK, we’re not doing anything productive in the morning, and we’re not fooling anybody by telling ourselves that the giant bowl of Waffle Crisp I shoveled into my mouth this morning is doing my body any nutritional good.

I blame the workday. I blame the morning. Do you think anybody wants to wake up and go straight to work? No, nobody does. And then by the time we get home, we’re exhausted, way too tired to even think about making something decent for dinner. You know what? Screw dinner, that’s not a meal either, it’s just a daily struggle not to feel guilty about all of the money we’re throwing away every night on take-out.

Just give me lunch, OK, that’s all I need, a giant lunch, like three sandwiches, I want a whole bag of chips. Right, chips aren’t exactly that healthy, but whatever, it’s the middle of the day, it’s my only real time to myself, out in the sunlight, feeling like an actual human being. I’ll eat whatever I want for lunch, all right, just don’t talk to me about breakfast anymore. Most important meal of the day? Ha. More like least important meal of the day. Ha.